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Book Review: Prisongate: The shocking state of Britain’s prisons and the need for visionary change

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
DOI10.1177/146247450500700107
AuthorRod Morgan
Published date01 January 2005
Date01 January 2005
Subject MatterArticles
06 048135 (to/d) 23/11/04 3:09 pm Page 93
BOOK REVIEWS
perspicacious and often very technical analyses, in chapters whose lead authors are
acknowledged experts in their fields. Hansen, Bill and Pease’s analysis of so-called
‘nuisance offenders and of the use of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders’ is particularly inter-
esting because it enters a territory that Tonry does not explore, despite its centrality to
New Labour. It raises some of the bigger issues which he neglects – the tension between
retributive and distributive justice, for example – and the limited utility and fairness of
almost any penal intervention where some semblance of commitment to distributive
justice does not also prevail. In passing, this chapter also alludes to ‘electronic tagging’,
the only one to do so, despite New Labour having set such store by it, and having made
England and Wales the European leader in its use.
That point signals the book’s obvious weakness – or rather, misleading sub-title. It is
not a fully comprehensive overview of New Labour’s crime and penal policies – elec-
tronic tagging is not the only gap. It is selective, and too beholden to official definitions
of what is and is not important in policy terms. It does not ground its chapter-by-chapter
analyses in a particularly deep or sophisticated understanding of New Labour’s political
project. What there is here is nonetheless worth having and all the chapters constitute
raw material for a fuller, future understanding of New Labour specifically and early
twenty-first century penality more generally. Judging by the summary of discussion
provided here, the seminars on which they were based were clearly important events –
intellectually lively affairs which cannot but have left the practitioners clearer-eyed than
they would otherwise have been. This record of them will remain a useful source book
for some time to come, but it is not the definitive account of New Labour’s crime control
policies that its overly bold sub-title seems to promise. Tonry is apparently...

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